Tumbleweed — what’s the holdup

It has been around 10 days since the last update to opensuse Tumbleweed. That would have been snapshot 20150612. This is a brief note to explain the delays.

The Tumbleweed team are in the process of switching over to using gcc 5 as their compiler. This is an update from the earlier gcc 4.x. So now they want to recompile the complete opensuse distribution using gcc 5.

Apparently this is mostly done. But there are a few packages that are still not compiling properly with gcc 5. So this take time for people to look at the error messages and make whatever changes are needed.

In the meantime, if you use “zypper dup” to attempt an update, you might run into a bunch of conflict errors. This will happen if you are using some software from the Packman repo. The Packman repo for Tumbleweed has been mostly rebuilt using gcc 5. But the result is that some of the software needs a library that comes with gcc 5. And you won’t have that library until the main repo updates to gcc 5.

When that expected update does show up, it will be a large one. Almost every package is likely to be updated.

I will probably download the DVD installer iso. I’ll use that for a test install. And I’ll also use that iso (written to a USB) as a local repo. This will reduce the amount I will have to download during the update, because I will have downloaded it before starting the update. But latex won’t be on that DVD installer, so my next update will still be downloading a lot of packages.